Wearers of the Tier 5 helm (or those planning to get the helm from the Season 2 arena set) will be happy to know that there are plans to allow avatar hair to show when wearing this item. Temis of Lightninghoof posted on the Test Realm Forums inquiring about the possibility for both the Malorne helms and Nordrassil headpieces and — surpringly enough — Blizzard QA Hortus responded:

The Nordrassil helms will be fixed in a future patch.

After trying it both ways It was decided by the designers that the Malorne Helms looked best without hair.

Nordrassil Current	Nordrassil Future	Malorne Current	Malorne ???

Edit: It’s being reported on the PTR that the Malorne helms are showing hair, so it’s possible that both may be changed after all when the patch goes live.

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• Natural Perfection No Longer Triggers from Crits while Sitting

The patch notes from Patch 2.1 stated that the Balance talent, Nature’s Grace could be triggered by critical hits from Swiftmend and the bloom component of Lifebloom (as well as triggering from casts of Cyclone). When the patch went live, however, players noted that Nature’s Grace was still not triggering from Lifebloom crits. This was generally considered a bug, but yesterday Blizzard QA Hortus stated that Lifebloom cannot trigger Nature’s Grace due to a limitation of the spell system:

Lifebloom can not proc Natures grace, this is a current limitation of the spell system.

There was a mistake in the 2.1.1 patch notes that included Lifebloom when it should not have.

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Community Manager Eyonix finished levelling his druid to 70 last night, a fact which he decided to share with the Offical Druid Forum community:

Last night I leveled to 70 with my Druid, and have decided that it’s better for me to respec restoration.

Okay, I’m lying. I am completely in love with balance, and this week I plan to begin running through the various end-game dungeons as a dps/off-healer, gaining reputation and gear so that I can make my way towards heroics, and eventually raiding. I also wouldn’t mind doing some runs main-healing for purposes of testing and comparison. At level 69 I was able to successfully main-heal Botanica on three consecutive runs.

Also, I’m going to try and form a 2v2 arena team today, but I do suck at pvp… *sigh*

As might be expected, the thread has degenerated into bickering among druid players of the three talent-specs about which talent tree is the most deserving of developer attention. It’s interesting that many players clamor for CM-representation for their chosen class (see a CM post on the druid forums and you’ll have readers from other classes immediately imploring their participation in the paladin/shaman/warrior/mage forums). Much of the playerbase seems to feel reliant upon community managers bending the ears of the development staff to have serious issues weighed appropriately. In general, this is a very bad perception to have fostered. Community Managers are (rightfully) not chosen for their playing skill or knowledge of game mechanics. Were they to be the primary source of feedback to developers regarding individual classes and specs, many pressing issues would undoubtedly be overlooked.

Unfortunately, posts like these (however well-intentioned) do little to dispel this myth. Eyonix no doubt wanted to give the druid community warm fuzzies that we among the other, more popular classes were his currently chosen class to level to 70. Instead, players feel as though they must urgently convey all of the class’s issues to him for recognition. After all, if Eyonix doesn’t notice these issues and agree that they are problematic, they are unlikely to be addressed.

A better way of fostering the notion that class concerns (and not merely the concerns of CMs playing individual classes) are being appropriately considered would be a monthly post that recognizes the discussions of individual issues that were brought up for the previous month. These issues wouldn’t necessarily have to be addressed; it would be enough for many players to see that the topics themselves had been presented to the development staff. City of Heroes/Villains does something like this on a regular basis — a sort of “State of the Union” for individual types of characters. Such a policy would have the added benefit that players of an individual class would not feel ignored when no Community Manager had recently declared for them.

Of course, in the meantime, I hope that Eyonix tries out Tree of Life in heroic instances and feels the lack of an out-of-combat res!

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European CM Ommra just announced that Tree of Life will finally gain access to the Barkskin spell with the release of patch 2.1:

Druids will be able to cast Barkskin in Tree of Life form in 2.1.

Severely limited in defensive ability, Tree of Life will gain a small amount of usability in arena with this change. This will also allow trees to pair of Tranquility + Barkskin in 5-man instances and raids.

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